The End of a Comic

It’s part of a comic artist’s life that assignments come and go. Last year, I was asked by magazine Open Deur to make a comic for their back page. It was a bit of an experiment for them, for the run of one year. And now the year is over and they decided to discontinue the comic.

Open Deur is a Dutch magazine that’s given out for free in churches. It has a very liberal and open character (hence the name: Open Door) and every issue has a special theme – sometimes very biblical, at other times more general. The editors gave me free range, and I took the opportunity to make the comic into a bit of an experimental place for myself. In ten issues, I have drawn very different things. I drew a Sandbox Dialogue, a comic featuring God and also did some full page illustrations. But what kept coming up were the adventures of a nameless family: father, mother and son.

Here’s the mother and son in a story about the bible book of Esther:

And here’s one about Freedom, that did not get published in the end since the back page was needed for something else:

I liked how these characters “worked”.

Maybe they’ll pop up in a later comic, you never know. But for now, it’s the end for this particular comics run.